Why midcentury Americans believed the suburbs were making them sick

[Recursion]

http://www.curbed.com/2016/5/25/11746862/cold-war-suburbs-1950s-health

The harried suburban family man, gulping coffee each morning to catch his train into the city and returning to collapse, martini in hand, into his armchair each night, was a stock comic figure in postwar culture. Keats made his John Drone a more pitiable example of the type. Drone, a government worker, feels a "tightening, knotted cord about his temples" after moving to Rolling Knolls. He lies awake at night fretting over installment payments on the car, the TV set, the dryer. When the family trades up from the rambler to a split-level in Maryland, he takes side jobs at a liquor store and at Sears to pay the mortgage, and he leaves the house at 6:00 every morning to beat the rush downtown. Despite all his labors, there is no final reward for John Drone: the victim of chicanery, he learns at the end of the book that he is liable for the mortgage on the rambler he thought he’d sold. The Drones are left to face financial ruin.

In The Exurbanites (1955), a droll portrait of the writers and ad men who were then fanning out from Manhattan to the sleepy country towns of Bucks and Fairfield and Rockland counties, A.C. Spectorsky (a magazine and television editor) dubbed those towns "the Psychosomatic Belt." He continued: "A physician with many exurban patients states that he has noticed, among a remarkably high percentage of those who are commuters, what he terms ‘extreme rigidity’ and a notable head of steam built up and (mostly) kept under pressure which he defines as repressed hostility." According to Spectorsky, the doctor cited hay fever, hives, hypertension, back pain, and chronic fatigue as the commuter’s usual disorders.

A quasi-scientific account of widespread male stress is presented in The Split-Level Trap, a bestselling 1961 study of suburban dysfunction by New Jersey psychiatrist Richard Gordon and his psychologist wife, Katherine Gordon. ("A Kinsey report on suburbia," according to a review in the Chicago Daily News.) The Gordons contended that the nation’s new communities were a "Disturbia" of restless and troubled young strivers, a lopsided society that lacked the balance of older, "integrated" towns (integrated by age and class, that is, not race). As suburbia’s men rushed to get ahead, the Gordons claimed, they would be vulnerable to developing early heart disease, especially if they had risen from a lower social class.

The authors included a table of local cases of heart disease broken down by age and income to support their point. The Split-Level Trap draws on copious data from Bergen County, N.J., health records, but it’s not very convincing to a 21st-century reader; chronic stress is always assumed to be the prime cause of illness, whether mental or physical. So, from the county health data on heart disease, the Gordons concluded that strivers must be pushing themselves too far, too fast. It being 1961, they didn’t ask how much the patients smoked and drank, how sedentary their habits were, or whether heart disease ran in their families.

[Jesus Malverde]

1. I think a part of it is the auto and the commute

People seem to walk more in urbanized environments.

[Warpy]

2. Meanwhile, women were ghettoized there

with no other adults to talk to, no transportation, and no way to escape for a few hours. They waited for Mr. Pressure Cooker to come home and drive them to the supermarket on Saturday and church on Sunday and those were their big breaks.

Conservaitves are in love with the 1950s because everybody knew their place. What they don't realize is just how uncomfortable those places were, even in upper income, lily white suburbs. Rich women took Miltown, poorer women drank, and a lot of really desperate women did both--and these were the people who had nice houses in nice neighborhoods and plenty to eat.

The other "places" people knew were even worse.

[TeamPooka]

3. Bachelor in Paradise, a 1960s Bob Hope movie tackles some of this in a humorus way.

its on TCM several times a year

[malthaussen]

4. Never read that particular book...

... but Yates's Revolutiuonary Road, which the article mentions, is a sure-fire way to ruin your day.

Yates and Keats? Really?

-- Mal

[Recursion]

5. I noticed that too. John Keats, no less (nt)

[brett_jv]

7. "A dreaded sunny day, so I meet you at the Cemetry Gates

Keats and Yates are on your side ...
while Wilde is on mine!"

[Igel]

6. Some did. Most didn't.

WYSIATI.

Most of the "researchers" and writers also had a bias. They didn't like white flight, they didn't like suburbs, they liked cities. They also didn't like the uniformity and conformity of the suburbs; they were non-conformists by and large even in cities, and cities allowed more non-conformity. They'd view suburbs as death. Of course, if you look at how cities were stratified, you also find the same kind of conformity but in strata: you conform with your set and coexist with other conformist sets. That this happened in the 'burbs wasn't visible from 5 or 10 miles away; given the lower population density, some non-conformist groups were too thinly spread out to be a cohesive group with their own public spaces.

Most of the young that moved to suburbia immediately acquired kids. School activities. And there were social clubs, most of which *were* within walking distance. Social alienation wasn't as intense as it's made out to be by urbanites, who confuse associating with others because you're in a public space with associating with people because of common interests or goals (if only to avoid boredom). Personally, I get no sense of community eating in public if they're all strangers; however, eating with a half-dozen friends is community. I've heard others, though, say it's "good to be part of the community" or some such when it was just the two of us having a beer in a pub. Social distrust is far higher now than then, and often higher in cities (esp. in some parts of cities) than in the 'burbs.